1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for storing a phone number in a mobile terminal, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method for automatically storing a phone number wherein the phone number is unregistered in the mobile terminal and has been used a predetermined number of times.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile terminals have become necessities of modern life for people of all ages. Thus, service providers and terminal manufacturers are competitively developing differentiated products (or services).
For example, the mobile terminal has developed into a multimedia device capable of providing various services such as phonebooks, games, short messages, e-mails, wake-up calls, MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3) players, digital cameras, and wireless Internet services.
A phonebook function is a value-added function whereby a phone number of a called party to whom a calling party (or user) wants to make a call is dialed in a state that a plurality of phone numbers frequently used are stored in a memory of the mobile terminal, and, whenever needed, the phone number of the calling party is selected from the pre-stored phone numbers. For a user's convenience, the provision of the phonebook function enables the user to easily make a call without having to remember a plurality of phone numbers. Therefore, the phonebook function is used by many users.
Disadvantageously, however, the phonebook function can be used only after the user inputs a phone number to be registered and then presses many menu keys several times, which is inconvenient. As a result, those who are not familiar with the operation of the mobile terminal may miss a time for registering the phone number.
When the user wants to make a call to a phone number to which a previous call is made and which is not registered in the mobile terminal, the user may find the phone number from a recent call log. However, since the recent call log can store only a limited number of phone numbers, the phone number may not exist in the recent call log when the recent call log is updated upon receiving incoming/outgoing call numbers. In this case, the user can neither register the phone number nor use the phone number to make a call.
Accordingly, there is a need for an apparatus and method for automatically storing a phone number in the mobile terminal wherein the phone number is listed in a recent call log (e.g. an outgoing call history) and has been used a predetermined number of times.